books

Ah, Friday

I went to work early this morning, arriving at the office at 8 o’clock. I do that sometimes, mostly to enjoy the quiet and my breakfast, though by the end of the day I’m usually tired enough to be wondering why.

Glad the weekend’s here, all things considered. It wasn’t a rough week, by any means, but I’m still so unused to getting up and going to bed at a reasonable hour.

I am, however, reading and writing more than I did over the break, so that’s nice. This evening on the train, I finished reading Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light, which had been recommended — I believe to the audience at last year’s Selected Shorts show — by Neil Gaiman, and it was quite good.

And that’s it for Friday.

So began the winter of my thirty-fifth year…

I rang out the year by watching The Dirty Dozen, which seemed vaguely appropriate. I saw the ball drop in Times Square but skipped the rest of the Rockin’ New Year’s Eve bash.

I spent the day pretty much like I would have almost any Sunday, even back in that long-lost era of 2011. I did the Sunday crossword. I read a little. I watched a little TV. I took the Christmas lights down from outside. I did a little cleaning. I did a little research on local apartments. Not exactly setting the world on fire in the new year, but it was a pleasant enough day.

Oh, and I officially launched the new Kaleidotrope issue. I hope you’ll visit and enjoy the stories, even if you haven’t subscribed in the past. It’s all free — although donations are always welcome — and there’s even a forum, where you can comment on what you’ve read or ask any questions, make suggestions, etc. Again, I hope you’ll visit and help spread the word.

Tomorrow, I go back to work after more than two weeks off. It’s going to be an adjustment. I’ve almost forgotten what it was like to go to bed at a reasonable hour, but I’m looking forward to a little more structure to my days. If only because it means I’m likely to get some more reading done. Except for a little over Christmas weekend, when I struggled to read in the car to and from my sister’s house, and a few short stories today, I really haven’t done much reading since taking off. That wasn’t the plan, but that’s what seems to have happened. I’m looking forward to my morning commute if only because I can spend it with a good book.

Some writing in the evening would be good, too.

Now if I just didn’t have all those Downton Abbey and Vampire Diaries episodes to still get through…

Books, movies, and music: a look back

If you include books I read for work, some of which I truthfully read in manuscript form last year, and if you include a healthy number of graphic novels, I read just shy of 100 books this past year.

Which ones stand out now more than the others? Kevin Brockmeier’s The Illumination. Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon. Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Jeff Smith’s Bone series. Jedediah’s The Manual of Detection. Tina Fey’s Bossypants. Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. Paul Harding’s Tinkers. And, of course, Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, for all the wrong reasons. But I’ve stopped being angry about that, honest.

I’m more than a little disappointed that I didn’t read much of anything these past couple of weeks, which all too often seems to be the pattern when I’m on vacation, but I’m going to try to up that number next year.

Then again, it’s not all about quantity; inspired, in part, by this Studio 360 segment, I’ve decided to re-read a certain number of books in 2012. I’m thinking maybe five or six, which seemed like a more reasonable number than my original plan of twelve, one for every month. I’ve always been vaguely jealous of people who, every year or so, curl up with an old favorite book once again, and I already have some titles in mind for doing just that in 2012.

I saw 59 movies in 2011. I’ll probably see at least one or two more before the year, and my vacation, is up. The best of them? Touch of Evil. True Grit. The Social Network. Green for Danger. The Fighter. The Third Man. All About Eve. Though, really, only a few movies I saw this year were truly awful. (I’m looking at you, Clash of the Titans.)

Musically, it was a really good year, and like always I had a tough time putting together my “best of the year” mix. But put it together I finally did — a couple of weeks ago, actually, so I could mail some copies out for the holidays — and here it is:

  1. “Canaan” by Black Dub
  2. “Truth” by Alex Ebert
  3. “Rox in the Box” by the Decemberists
  4. “Shell Games” by Bright Eyes
  5. “Dreams” by Brandi Carlile
  6. “Paris (Ooh La La)” by Grace Potter & the Nocturnals
  7. “Police on My Back” by the Clash
  8. “Optimist” by Zoe Keating
  9. “the devil is in the beats” by the Chemical Brothers
  10. “Helplessness Blues” by Fleet Foxes
  11. “The Tiger Inside Will Eat the Child” by Fatty Gets a Stylist
  12. “Party in the CIA” by Weird Al Yankovic
  13. “Civilian” by Wye Oak
  14. “Gimme Sympathy” by Metric
  15. “Paper Forest (in the Afterglow of Rapture)” by Emmy the Great
  16. “Job’s Coffin” by Tori Amos
  17. “Charming Disease” by Gabriel Kahane
  18. “So Far From the Clyde” by Mark Knopfler
  19. “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye (feat. Kimbra)
  20. “Mad Mission” by Patty Griffin
  21. “Tragic Turn of Events/Move Pen Move” by Dan Mangan & Shane Koyczan
  22. “The Gulf of Araby” by Natalie Merchant
  23. “Redemption Song” by Johnny Cash & Joe Strummer
  24. “Gangsta” by Tune-Yards

I’m not entirely pleased with some of it, particularly in the second half. (It’s more or less chronological, and I’ve had less time to live with some of those later songs.) I also can’t believe I left off Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep”, which really was one of my favorites from the beginning of the year, despite how inescapable the song has become in the months since. I try not to fault an artist her success, and I’m always weirdly amused on those rare occasions when my tastes match up with top 40 radio.

Rainy Wednesday

A normal, if rainy, middle-of-the-week, middle-of-the-road kind of day. It was broken up only by a surprisingly really informative presentation about the higher education model in the United Kingdom. (Short version: it’s very different from the model here in the U.S., both from a student’s and a bookseller’s perspective.)

Thanksgiving cornucopia

  • We live in a country where pizza is a vegetable. I’m just saying. [via]
  • Harry Potter director developing all-new Doctor Who movie. Not at all a sure thing, but still, when do we stop remaking things? Maybe when the last remake is still on-going?
  • Genevieve Valentine on Immortals, which she describes as “a batch of snickerdoodles with thumbtacks inside.”

    The labyrinth and Minotaur are well turned out, and their showdown takes place in a temple mausoleum, where an archway of stairs frames a goddess’s head that’s inset with candles to make it glow from within. It’s the sort of thing where you think, “Man, that’s good looking! I wish this stupid scene would stop so we could just look at it.”

  • I really don’t know what to think about actress suing IMDB for revealing her age. They both seem to have a perfectly valid point.
  • Massive plagiarism might help your book sales [via]
  • Billy Crystal will be hosting the Oscars this year, giving me another reason not to watch. Which is not a dig at Crystal, necessarily, who I generally like…you know, back when he made movies people watched. But it’s such a safe, boring choice. The Academy really missed a golden opportunity to let the Muppets host the Oscars
  • Tilt-shift Van Gogh
  • Polite Dissent on Forgotten Drugs of the Silver-Age:

    The more I think about it, for all intents and purposes, Jor-El was a mad scientist. He espoused scientific theories well outside the accepted norm and performed numerous unauthorized scientific experiments of questionable ethics.

  • Mysterious D.C. rampage leaves smashed cars in its wake. Seriously, it looks like the Hulk went through there. [via]
  • And finally, the Center for Fiction interviews Margaret Atwood:

    I think it’s a human need to name – to tell this from that. On the most basic level, we need to distinguish – as crows do – the dangerous creature from the harmless one, and – as all animals do – the delicious and healthful food object from the rotting, poisonous one. In literary criticism it’s very helpful to know that the Harlequin Romance you sneak into when you think no one is looking is not the same, and is not intended to be the same, as Moby Dick. But stories and fictions have always interbred and hybridized and sent tendrils out into strange spaces.